A question, are you using the "pic" or have you ever used it, probably it is nothing, but we could isolate the flags one by one. Till now it seems that nptl and nptlonly seem to have no relation to this problem (I have tried the both of them, someone said that he had lockups with the 2.4-series kernel headers, which effectively excludes them)._________________"I knew when an angel whispered into my ear,
You gotta get him away, yeah
Hey little bitch!
Be glad you finally walked away or you may have not lived another day."
Godsmack

ive had absolutely no luck the past week, still consistant predictable lockups with all versions of xorg, including the latest 6.8.99.5.. i want to give gnome a whirl since it appears to be KDE related on my box.. hey all you portage geniuses, how do i remove qt and all that depends on it, i specified in my use flags "kde qt -gtk -gtk2 -gnome" so i effectively want to reverse that, any commands that might help?

For what its worth, I haven't had any more problems after switching to gnome. This is not the solution to my problem, but at least its buying my system some stability so it doesn't freeze my server everytime I go to work

You can't get away from a problem that affects xorg just by switching desktop environments. The new environment you are on may live slightly longer but sooner or later your going to experience a freeze. I am speaking from experience because I used to use Mandrake with Kde and had constant lockups.

Out of frustration I switched my distro and environment to Fedora with Gnome. Gnome was a little more stable but I still experienced freezes, I just didn't experience the freezes as often for some reason. Eventually even the freezes there became annoying so I switched to gentoo, and here the freezes only show up about once a week on fluxbox. In the long run we have to solve the problem though.

For what its worth, I haven't had any more problems after switching to gnome. This is not the solution to my problem, but at least its buying my system some stability so it doesn't freeze my server everytime I go to work

You can't get away from a problem that affects xorg just by switching desktop environments. The new environment you are on may live slightly longer but sooner or later your going to experience a freeze. I am speaking from experience because I used to use Mandrake with Kde and had constant lockups.

Out of frustration I switched my distro and environment to Fedora with Gnome. Gnome was a little more stable but I still experienced freezes, I just didn't experience the freezes as often for some reason. Eventually even the freezes there became annoying so I switched to gentoo, and here the freezes only show up about once a week on fluxbox. In the long run we have to solve the problem though.

Try the boot params I suggested and your problems will be done. This is kernel related issue.

My lockups of X actually when away as soon as I upgraded from latest gentoo-sources-2.4 to latest gentoo-sources-2.6.
Running latest stable Xorg on nvidia (Gf4go) with KDE 3.3.2 on a Toshiba laptop (p4m 1.7ghz, 512mb ram)

While running 2.4, X (XFree and later Xorg) would sometimes lockup, completely blocking my system. Since I never had that problem before, I always presumed it to be a problem with ndiswrapper (to drive a Linksys WPC54G), because it was the only hardware that changed/was added, and it would sometimes cause a kernel oops at boot.
But even without the card inserted and module loaded, it would lockup, mostly after playing games, notably the Linux port of Doom 3 (which would lockup just about everytime upon exiting the game).

After that, I upgraded to gentoo-sources-2.6 with latest unstable ndiswrapper. The unstable ndiswrapper doesn't cause any kernel oopses anymore, and seems to be running fine.
Because of 2.6.11, I had to install ~x86 nvidia: the result was that KDE would hang upon the splashscreen. Disabling RenderAccel seemed to helped a lot, because after that I really never had any lockups of X before.
This might not be of much help, but I'm not using ntlp or pic in my USE flags, and my CFLAGS are not that aggressive:

2) has anyone considered comparing I/O schedulers to see if there's any relationship?

3) is there a wiki (or some better tool if there is one) we might use to begin the process of comparing configurations?

I killed all but the cfq scheduler in the kernel, dumped all but the vesa fb, and passed the idle=poll, noapic and nolapic params to kernel and lowered the maxtor drive to udma3 and for what it's worth, my X/kde/fluxbox sessions haven't frozen since. Before all that, in kde, loading openoffice would almost certainly freeze X. I have loaded every app available, and set multiple background processes going, with a load avg approaching 6, then open and closed openoffice and over and over again. I'm amd64 ... I believe this is not just an X or kde prob, but is an issue in the kernel that gets triggered or exacerbated by X/kde, etc. God willing, I've solved the problem on my box, though these tweaks may be unacceptable to others with different uses.

Converter, someone has recommended his kernel config (in the first thread), which was without the anticipatory scheduler, I've excluded it too but there were no difference. I looked at my config now and I have noop, anticipatory, deadline and [cfq](this one is used). But this is probably far-fetched, because there were people reporting the same problems with 2.4 series of kernels, if I correctly recollect the contents of the whole thread ::))_________________"I knew when an angel whispered into my ear,
You gotta get him away, yeah
Hey little bitch!
Be glad you finally walked away or you may have not lived another day."
Godsmack

I also had those odd lockups.
I can't exactly spot the time when it happened several months ago,
but I remember it started when I upgraded a lot of stuff like glibc,gcc,xorg and proprietary nvidia drivers.
Some versions of the nvidia drivers were locking up more quickly than others.
6629 was the most stable I think for my geforce2mx.
I'm using the latest nvidia drivers by now with some new hardware geforce6600GT pci-express.
Option "NvAGP" "0" in xorg.conf (I was using NvAGP 1 before and I don't use the in-kernel agpgart) fixed the problem for me.
I don't quite understand what does the NvAGP option actually do (some performance tweaks for the agp bus ?!).
Anyway, I had no performance loss from switching that option from 1 to 0 and I had no lockups at all since.

I think we all believe that the root cause is coming from xorg. To see if this is true regarding my system, I have turned off xorg and see if it is going to run without freezing for a while.

Over the weekend I experienced more frequent freezes. I upgraded to the latest kernel and re-compiled glibc. The reason why I recompiled glib was because I had built my and ran my kernel with nptl support for a long time, but never rebuilt glibc with nptl support. Having nptl in glibc and kernel does not help. That's why I am resorting to turning off my xorg server now.

I will report back on whether this is helping my system or not.

If it doesn't improve my stability then I believe I have some other issues (bad MB/cpu or something else?). If it does stop the freezes then I think it indicates that xorg has been the problem.

I have added the idle=poll noapic noacpi and even added noapm. My system has not frozed. Instead, one time when it seemed like it was going to freeze it just got real sluggish for 30 seconds and then it began running again with no problems. I have been running for 2 days now with no problems. I'll see how this works a week from now but I really think this is an answer. Normally I would have experienced a freeze by now.

I had been experiencing this problemwith the 7167 nvidia drivers, I'd run glxgears, and as soon as I either hit the x to close the program, or even moved the window, the system would freeze with X at 100% cpu, and I couldn't kill it or get the screen back (Could still move the mouse though). I just downgraded to 6629-r4 and did an emerge - e world. I ran glxgears and move the window, and alas, it appeared to freeze. However, I clicked on the terminal, and after about three minutes it popped up, and I was able to kill glxgears. Dropped from about 93 frames per second to .5 during the freezing, so I suppose there's something there. I had added the noapic noacpi options a while back with the older drivers, but it didn't seem to help.

For people with older video cards (geforce2), they only way I could get RenderAccel to work is use the older nvidia video drivers, 6629. Now it works great. Though kompmgr is not perfect, it has been getting much better quickly and in a year, it should be aproaching comercial quality.

I was haunted for months by the same problem as the original poster in Thread No.1.

Symptoms: freezes occur randomly, X in some loop at max cpu, mouse still moves, ssh works, XID error 13 in dmesg.
This is on an athlon xp with a geforce 4 ti on a 2.6.10-gentoo-r6 kernel.

Problem went away for a few days, sometimes weeks, thought I (or portage) solved it, then it would reappear out of the blue.

Most of the time I use a system backup I created in december that runs absolutely stable. So much about using a "bleeding edge" distro.
It has the same kernel configuration, so it's no acpi, apic, .... issue related to the kernel config in my case.

For me the problem was finally reproducable by simply viewing
http://computer.ytmnd.com/
in konqueror, a link I found in the nvnews forums.

Well, I just downgraded stuff, till the page loaded without freezing.
Putting

I think the problem kinda disapeared from my machine.
Got an uptime of 8 days using the nvidia drivers and no hardlocks or freezes - the bad thing is I have no idea how/what fixed it.
ps: kernel 2.6.12-rc4 ( full ~amd64 - no-multilib profile )

*update*
since it was running so well, i decided to try the composite stuff to get some shadows going .. well it locked up instantly
So for sure im not messing with composite again in any near future._________________linux: #232767

Last edited by ikaro on Thu May 19, 2005 12:49 pm; edited 1 time in total

I experienced two lockups. The first just after switching with Ctrl-Alt-F8 from an X session to another. Rebooting the machine, me and my roommate tried to reproduce the freeze opening two X sessions and switching between them a couple of times. Nothing happened, but after 20 minutes of navigation with Firefox the machine locked up again. Checking with memtest86 overnight I was sure there were no memory/motherboard errors.

I never experienced any lock up before, but I really rarely started more than one session before.
Don't know if they're X freezes or kernel freezes. Logs of both programs tell me nothing._________________Google is the index to the unwritten Linux manual.

I have added the idle=poll noapic noacpi and even added noapm. My system has not frozed. Instead, one time when it seemed like it was going to freeze it just got real sluggish for 30 seconds and then it began running again with no problems. I have been running for 2 days now with no problems. I'll see how this works a week from now but I really think this is an answer. Normally I would have experienced a freeze by now.

I have to report that the parameters didn't fix the issue. I ran limewire and experienced a hard lock. I also downgraded to the nvidia 6111 drivers. That downgrade didn't help either. The last part for my new computer should be comming in the mail tommorow. I'll only be using this computer for a week or so before I turn it into a server and just switch to my new desktop.